Modernism, War, and Violence

Marina MacKay is Associate Professor in the Faculty of English and Tutorial Fellow at St Peter's College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Modernism and World War II (2007) and The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel (2010), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of World War II (2009).

Although other critics have described the particular ways in which modernist writers have represented war and violence, Marina MacKay makes this topic new in her comprehensive and generative study, Modernism, War, and Violence. In this physically concise yet intellectually expansive volume, MacKay grants her reader a panoramic view of war and violence in Anglophone literature from the fin-de-siecle to the Cold War, offering many fresh and incisive ideas along the way … It is hardly possible to overstate how useful this book would be for a graduate student seeking to gain surer footing in thinking about the continuity of twentieth-century literature. Modernism, War, and Violence is a gift to the field of literary modernism, on that we knew we needed.

• 1. A Terrible Beauty is Born2. Modernism and the Great War3. Modernism and Political Violence4. Journeys to a War5. Modernism and the Second World WarEpilogue: Cold War Modernism?Works Cited BibliographyIndex